


Accounts Payable

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M, Morality, Season/Series 02, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 00:01:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5110286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A coda to Unsentimentalf's "<a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5058214">The Sound of Ideologies Clashing</a>". </p><p>Avon takes advantage of an opportunity to clear his ledger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accounts Payable

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Sound of Ideologies Clashing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5058214) by [Unsentimentalf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf). 



> beta'd by Aralias (Elviaprose is also very responsible for talking through the content with me, but somehow suspect she is not eager to own her midwifing role in this case.)
> 
> With permission from Unsentimentalf.
> 
> Fair warning, this is not a nice one! It takes the depressing ending of "The Sound of Ideologies Clashing" and pushes that along as a kind of experiment.
> 
> The title used to be a Hayek joke (I was torn between The Impure Theory of Capital and The Road to Serfdom), but it didn't really work.
> 
> Also discarded the summary 'Avon gets Austrian-schooled' because if you're going to do a joke for just-you, it should at least be a good joke.

It hadn’t been easy to get the information out of Orac—he’d had to maneuver Vila into asking, because Blake had been quite clear that Orac was, under no circumstances, to communicate whatever was going on to _him_. That was all Avon had heard as he’d approached the flight deck – Blake saying, ’Don’t tell _Avon_ anything about this’. And at that point Avon had known he was going to employ whatever means necessary to obtain the information. Anything Blake wanted to keep from him, Avon wanted access to. Recently, Blake had neglected to tell Avon something rather personal that Avon had felt he had every right to know. Thus at the moment Avon nursed a particular, vengeful grudge against any instances of Blake’s reticence.

And how Avon had _smiled_ as Orac had explained the situation to Vila. At least the last two Christmases, come at once. It was quite simple, really. He could have guessed, although—no, he couldn’t have imagined anything so perfect.

They were running from a planet where Blake had been briefly detained by the Federation, before he’d managed to escape under his own power. That was his story—and it was (as Avon now had good reason to know) entirely true. It just wasn’t the whole of the truth.

What Blake had neglected to mention was that, while he’d been in Federation custody, he’d been injected with a particular compound of drugs. A veracity-inducing serum and its hand-maiden, a memory-lapser that would prevent Blake from knowing what information the Federation had taken from him, perhaps even from knowing that he’d been taken into custody at all. The drugs took a while to kick in, but the troops had been over-confident. They’d felt themselves more able to hold Blake than had turned out to be the case. Amateurs. They probably hadn’t treated him any differently than they would have treated any other criminal high on the wanted list.

Avon doubted they’d intended to release Blake back into the wild after questioning (which made the lapser something of a moot point)—not unless they could get in contact with someone a bit imaginative, anyway. Servalan or someone similarly devious might have been able to use the situation to her advantage to take the Liberator, but these people had probably just given their prize the standard stuff while they figured out what the hell to do with ‘ _the_ Blake’. The planet in question was a core world, and Avon was given to understand this cocktail was considered quite a common dose thereon. He couldn’t be absolutely sure he’d never experienced it himself.

Well, then. Blake would be on truth drugs in about—two hours, according to Orac’s information. And completely unable to remember oh, _anything_ about a conversation he’d had under the influence, in its aftermath. And all Avon had to do was wait for the incubation period to elapse.

“Thank you, Vila,” he said.

Vila shot him a nervous look—but he probably wouldn’t mention to Blake that Avon had known. It would, after all, reveal his own hand in the prying. Besides, Vila would have no proof that Avon had done anything other than simply _know_. Absently, Avon looped the security footage around Blake’s room, which Blake had retreated to, and tossed a laser probe from one hand to another.

After the requisite hours had passed, Avon let himself into Blake’s room, slipping past a formidable series of locks. Avon was relieved that, ultimately, he hadn’t had to ask Vila for help with this part of the plan—buying him off could prove costly. And then Vila did tend to blab.

Avon saw Blake lying sweaty and lank on the bed, shivering, looking wretched and ill. Ah. One of Avon’s plans died a natural death. Blake was hardly attractive at the moment, and certainly in no condition to be talked into sex he wouldn’t have to remember, and thus feel responsible for.

Fortunately, Avon had another, perhaps more important reason for intruding.

Sick as he was, it took Blake a moment to realize Avon was there. When he did, a hurt look crossed his face. It then metastasized into disgust. Avon frowned, resisting an urge to take a step back.

“Why _didn_ _’_ _t_ I think you’d do it?” Blake asked. He half-laughed. “Every time I think my opinion of you can’t sink any lower…”

That—hurt, actually. Because Blake had been dosed with a truth serum, a good one, and thus that was—his unvarnished opinion. It settled Avon grimly in what he was going to do, more than anything else could have. If it genuinely surprised Blake that his opinion of Avon had room to sink, then what, after all, did Avon have to lose?

Unaware that Avon had just slipped past the point where he might have been talked out of this, Blake tried to warn him off.

“If not for my sake,” a hint of bitterness there, “you should go for yours. I don’t think you’re going to hear anything you want to.”

“If you’ll recall, you won’t give me an explanation, sober.”

“Ah,” Blake said softly. “So that’s it. I thought it might be.”

 _What_ ** _else?_** Avon seethed privately. What the hell _else_ did Blake imagine he’d been thinking about, over the past cold weeks, as Blake’s behaviour towards him began to shift? The tension between them now was something worse than awkwardness, more than the foreclosure of possibility. In every conversation he had with Avon, Blake was a little less present than he had been in similar discussions a month before. The exchange and the outcome mattered less to him. They obviously mattered less. _Avon_ mattered less. There were other things on Blake’s mind, of course. But it was more than that. (Or _less_ , perhaps.)

”It wasn’t unwillingness,” Blake corrected. “I couldn’t explain, just then.”

Blake _had_ looked gratifyingly upset when he’d left Avon’s room after their botched assignation. It hadn’t satisfied Avon (who had, after all, been left profoundly unsatisfied), but it had at least been something. At the time Avon had been too angry to find a drop of consolation in that, but over the subsequent weeks his memory had returned with treacherous fidelity and no little schadenfreude to how unhappy Blake had looked.

“Well,” Avon said, taking the chair from Blake’s desk and moving it to the bedside, sitting in it like a psychiatrist treating a patient on the couch, “let’s see if you feel more able to give an account of yourself now. Don’t you think I’m owed one?”

The first actual question—he was curious to see how Blake would answer it. What the drug would look like, in action. Whether he’d be able to look at Blake and just _know_ , see physical evidence of what Orac had promised him.

Oh yes, there it was. A shudder crossed Blake’s face as honesty was _ripped_ out of him. Avon watched, a little horrified and—interested.

“No,” Blake said flatly.

“No?” Avon pressed, his voice soft. Not, he thought, after you elicited a confession from _me?_ Not after you left, as though _that_ was all you had wanted of me? A moment’s weakness, after two years. And then Blake had what, lost interest?

“No, I don’t,” Blake panted. “I didn’t force you to tell me anything. You think you exposed yourself, telling me you wanted me, telling me that was why you hadn’t managed to run out yet—but I said worse, then and in the fight we had before. There we’re equal. You're more paranoid about exposure than I am, but that doesn’t change the facts. You’re not playing fair.”

“I am not interested in your opinion of my fairness,” Avon said, prompting Blake. Affecting disinterest, even as he registered something of a hit.

“And more fundamentally, I don’t owe you a _damn_ thing. I told you that stone sober. Even if you had been the only one to say _anything_ —all I’d owe you was civility. Decency. And I tried to give you that. More than you generally give me.”

Avon grit his teeth. “ _You_ were put out because I didn’t agree with you politically. Because I didn’t live up to your moral standards.” He managed to give that an especially mocking pronunciation.

“No,” Blake said, more guarded even than he had been.

Avon—was a little surprised. “Explain.” There. Broad enough to elicit a full-spectrum analysis, Avon hoped. And if not, well, the drug wouldn’t run its course for hours yet. He had time. He was interested in the results, after all. Oh, he was _very_ interested, and this was a unique opportunity.

Blake gave him a look Avon found difficult to interpret. “Please don’t do this.”

That surprised Avon. Begging, from Blake. He didn’t know whether to wet his lips or to mock Blake or to feel—taken aback. Blake was resisting the drug. Not _completely_ , but—more than could reasonably be expected. Either because he was more stubborn than was good for him (obviously true), or because he really, truly didn’t want to say.

Avon just smiled, terribly pleasantly.

“Explain,” he repeated, “in full.”

The look Blake gave him was furious, and Avon was slightly surprised to watch a further degree of distaste for him slide into Blake’s expression. _Blake_ , Avon reminded himself, unaccountably ill at ease, _will not remember this. It will not have happened._ He wasn’t doing anything wrong, as even someone who _did_ care about that sort of thing should have agreed. He was only asking for what he was entitled to, something which Blake would have withheld from him, without remorse, in other circumstances.

“No,” Blake said, “I didn’t expect you to agree with my opinions. I’m not an idiot. I assumed you disagreed with me, but I _expected_ that you had your own ethics, or ideas. Ideas that you’d _thought_ about, for more than a moment. I always trusted you to have a kind of integrity of self. I was wrong.” Blake didn’t look at him—it was like Avon wasn’t there. He gave the ceiling a wry smile instead. “Imagine my surprise to learn that you aren’t as clever as I’d imagined. You’ve never considered your own position, even when doing so became highly relevant to your life. You’re an opportunist, and you’re not even very good at it. Thirty-four and you have no fixed ideas about anything, nothing to show for all that short-sighted, immature self-interest.”

Avon blinked at him. Took a sharp breath. Rapped out a response. “Other people’s ideas matter to you, do they, Blake? The evidence suggests otherwise. If it isn’t identical to your own opinion, you’re not interested in what anyone else thinks. You did not, for example, seriously contest Geraint’s position.”

Blake laughed. Avon hadn’t known that Blake could manage an emptied-out laugh to rival Avon’s best. He didn’t exactly like knowing Blake had that in him, or that Blake had the capacity to do things Avon wouldn’t have thought him capable of. He didn’t like Blake laughing at him: he’d never done it before.

“What would have been the point? She wasn’t going to be moved by argument, there. Do you honestly believe that everyone who says they’re _rational_ is telling you the truth?”

“You’re hardly one to judge,” Avon snapped.

“This is my life’s work,” Blake said flatly. “I know about politics what you know about systems analysis. I’ve given more consideration to my convictions on this score and sacrificed more for them than you seem to have ever given anything in your entire life, Avon. So yes. I am _‘one to judge_ _’_ , if anyone is. Geraint’s dogmas are ideological fantasies. You think I’m thoughtless and naïve in my beliefs, which I don’t think you could so much as adequately summarize back to me. _That_ I could almost forgive. But to know you were swayed by the faux-, self-proclaimed pragmatism of a group of morons who have to _tell you_ they’re objective, that you nearly gave _your own unborn child_ to them without so much as thinking it through—”

“Forgive me if I lack your expertise,” Avon sneered. How and why had the seemingly trivial matter of some non-existent child become to Blake a synecdoche for Avon’s supposed short-comings? Avon supposed Blake would have said that Avon had his answer in the fact that Avon considered the subject trivial.

“You know I can’t. And you don’t need _expertise,_ Avon, though I could recapitulate _centuries_ ’ worth of arguments about how fundamentally farcical their doctrines are for you if I thought it would make a difference. You don’t care enough for me to bother. You were too intellectually lazy to do any of the work yourself. You didn’t even think to ask your girlfriend how long her family had been rich, or how long the Dera 2 families hadn’t—the question simply didn’t occur to you. I’m not surprised Geraint was a passionate advocate for her philosophy—she benefited from it. I’m less sure how the people without the resources to _leave_ felt about all the personal freedom they enjoyed.” Blake snorted. “Feudalism with more effective gunnery and without the romance. And that’s being generous.”

“Cant, Blake?” The accusation was ever-green. Avon always found it only too easy to gain a little ground by mocking Blake’s tone, his carelessly-worn over-investment.

Blake laughed weakly. “Oh it must be _lovely_ to scruple about the aesthetics of this. I’d quite like the luxury myself. But I can’t afford it. My family's dead, my life's in ruins, I'm on the run and couldn't go to ground if I wanted to, and I’m _well off_ compared to some—but please, do tell me more about how you find conversation about this strident—not quite to your taste. Explain that you prefer ‘reality’ or ‘survival’ to politics, as though those are possible distinctions to make and that’s a valid point rather than complete drivel. I’ve never heard _that_ one before.”

Blake turned his head to look at Avon, eyes dark and compelling in his slack, sick face, which looked meaty and lumpen with pain.

“Are you enjoying yourself, Avon?”

Avon didn’t answer. He felt riveted where he sat.

“You’re doing something fairly terrible to me. And getting all those answers you wanted,” Blake said with a lying mildness. “Shouldn’t you at least be enjoying this? Now, I think, it’s my turn to ask a question—that’s fair, isn’t it?” Avon opened his mouth to say—something, he didn’t know what, something to _stop_ him, but Blake continued. “What do you think you love in me, Avon?”

“I—” Avon swallowed, “never said that.”

“Didn’t you?” Blake asked with a sort of camp mock confusion Avon couldn’t bear.

“ _I_ do not have to answer anything,” Avon hissed.

“No, you don’t,” Blake conceded. “ _You_ _’_ _re_ not on drugs.”

“Why do you want to know?” Avon asked—the question, he thought, putting the situation back in his hands, ripping Blake open, leaving him as naked as Avon had felt when Blake had called the night they had almost _finally_ had sex a mistake he wanted to forget.

Avon only thought he might have regained the upper hand for a moment. Pain and anger had exhausted Blake’s mercy.

“Because I don’t understand,” Blake said, tone almost calm. “You don't seem to think I’m particularly intelligent. All right. I’ll accept that I might not be clever in ways you recognize or appreciate. You’re not looking excessively perspicacious to me at the moment, either. You don't admire my character underneath it all. I don’t think you appreciate my sense of humour, and you don’t have a lot of sympathy for me, or we wouldn’t be here. People have loved me before. They’ve had reasons, and you don’t seem to share any of them. If all you’re interested in is some sort of physical charisma, it’s nothing like enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to give any of this a point.”

Blake’s anger slumped into something low, something dredged up from the bottom of a river, clinging with sucking muck, sad and dark and putrefying, not meant for light and air.

“I’ve been mistaken,” Blake said. “I saw in you a person I could connect to more deeply, someone with some integrity. I don't know _what_ you saw in me. If you don't respect me, you shouldn't be with me. You should find someone you can respect, or some poor bastard who doesn’t mind your not respecting them, and be the nearest thing you can manage to happy. Hopefully I’ll find someone who gives a single fuck about anything I care about or, to be honest, about me. Someone who protects me because that’s what they want to do, not because of some ‘automatic reaction’. Those aren’t reliable—one day you’ll react wrong.”

Blake gave him a regretful, but somehow vacant look. “If you just like the way I make you feel—superior to me, or slick and dangerous because of the work we do, that’s a hobby, not a relationship with a person. And I’m not anyone’s hobby. What were we going to _do_ together, Avon? Have sex until you got bored with it? Grow old together? I doubt _that's_ what you imagined, if you did imagine anything. Do you even know what you wanted? Or did you think about me with about the same thoroughness you gave to your politics?”

Avon regarded him, and was surprised that he didn’t feel anything. Not just now, in the moment. He could sense the pressure on the perimeter of himself, knew it would come rushing in later, that this was a bad, bad wound he’d taken. He knew it because he couldn’t feel it at all. This was a bullet that would lodge in him, and he’d be picking out fragments for years.

“What did you mean, Blake?” Avon asked, his mind catching on one unclear element of that confession. If he was going to ache for this then he wanted all of it. No unanswered questions that would torment him later, no hopeless hope. He’d started to realize how much he’d paid for the privilege, and he wanted his money’s worth.

Blake shuddered, pushing his face away from Avon, into his pillow. “Please don’t,” he murmured, able to struggle because Avon hadn’t been precise. “Please leave me alone.” Avon knew he wasn’t quite asking it for himself.

“What,” Avon said with a smile that twisted through his voice and didn’t touch his eyes at all, “did you mean about integrity?”

“I—constructed this… idea of you. From flashes. Things I thought I saw moving in the shadows.”

Blake spoke slowly, spoke like he was mourning, though Avon was beside him.

“You’re not like that,” he continued. “You’re not even a whole person. You’re a nesting doll, and I assumed you were full inside.”

An eloquent, twisting movement of Blake’s large, capable hands, which Avon had long admired and wanted on him, in him (had even dreamt of taking inside him entirely, sliding fingers yielding to the twist and pressure and exquisite violation of a whole, implacable fist), mimed popping a matryoshka doll open and finding it bereft. Shaking it out and discovering that the shell had fooled him: actually this was all there was. Either that intricate succession of layers, that replete fullness, had never existed, or the pieces had been lost long ago. Waving the discovery off—so it went. The fact that these were Blake’s clever hands, which Avon had wanted to carefully open him up and fill him, making a easy joke of his vacuousness made Avon feel he _had_ been twisted apart at the seam. That the halves of him lay discarded and sundered, one still slowly spinning with the inertia of the touch with which Blake had tossed him aside.

“You don’t know yourself, or what you think about anything, or what you want, or why.” Blake breathed out raggedly. A long sigh a little like a sob, but altogether more resigned. “It’s not that you’re not who I thought you were. It’s worse. You’re not anyone. Two years in love with a fucking ghost. A stupid ghost, who doesn’t know that it isn’t a good idea to take something he’s afraid to ask for. In a way this feels worse than spending four years mind-wiped, because I did this to myself.”

“Were you jealous?” Avon asked, knowing as he said it that it was so small. Petty. Inane. A tangent. How he’d have framed the problem, not how Blake did. That this was just another proof that Blake was right, and he was everything his question was.

Blake thought he was empty. A cultured, suggestive shell. Well, why not? He felt it.

“I used to be,” Blake said with awful honesty, and Avon stood up, suddenly feeling he had to be anywhere but here. Still, he replaced the chair, sliding it under Blake’s desk. Erased the evidence of what he’d done.

A moment later, hand on the door, Avon spun around and marched back to the bed, desperate. He looked down at Blake, a shivering shape half-shrouded by sheets. Blake could be beautiful in animation—in delight or rage with the world. He wasn’t, now. He— Avon’s stupid hands ached to touch him.

“You still want me—don’t you?” Avon said. The question part rhetorical, part a demand. Part a pathetic little plea for a reassurance he knew was impossible. Didn’t exist. Like Blake’s Avon.

“All the time,” Blake said tonelessly. “With a passion I no longer think you’re capable of returning. I want such stupid things—your smiles, that never actually meant anything. But I keep telling myself it was just a dream, like all the false memories, and it _i_ _s_ getting better. In time I expect it will pass.”

And Blake would look back on Avon like a flaw in his own character. One dark spot of so many in his life. Avon would become to him what this conversation would be—something that hadn’t ever happened.

“For a time,” Blake murmured, “I thought the problem was that I couldn’t accept in a lover what I could in a friend. Now I think—there’s no real point in that, either. For much the same reasons.”

Avon stood over him, looking down. “It isn’t getting any better for _me,_ ” he said after a moment. “Does that surprise you? How can I feel like _that_ if there’s nothing in me?”

It sounded mocking, like a contradiction, but Avon couldn’t feel any of the collectedness, that distance that should have accompanied the tone he’d managed to call up.

Unfortunately, that had been a question. And so, inexorably, Blake answered it.

“I’ve come to think of it like a cyclone,” Blake said. “Wind and stray bits of houses floating past, and nothing in the core. Emotions with no substance to them. Like a body spasming after brain-death. But I didn’t want to cause you pain. I didn’t want to say this. I didn’t want to have to think it out. But,” Blake said with a lead-lined voice, “you did ask.”

It was too late. But Avon wished, _wished_ he hadn’t. He felt like he might be sick. He slipped from the room and returned to his own.

He sat on his bed, staring ahead at nothing.

There was, appropriately enough, a rather capitalist reading of the whole affair. As a romantic partner, he didn’t have anything Blake actually wanted. He couldn’t buy Blake. He wasn’t ‘worth’ it. The Avon Blake had dreamt seemed better and realer than the man Avon knew himself to be. And what was worse, than the man Blake now knew him to be.

Perhaps, when they’d had their initial conversation, Avon might have gone for a more Keynesian approach. Perhaps he should have been willing to go into debt, in the hope of acquiring greater benefits. Perhaps he should have believed in himself and in Blake and in the two of them enough to do it. If he’d made a more human appeal—been willing to expose more, or to engage with why he’d failed Blake by turning to Geraint—then he might have won Blake over, or at least kept negotiations open until such time as they could be concluded more satisfactorily. (Useless to say that what Avon did with Geraint or anyone else was none of Blake’s business—Blake would simply have agreed: no, it wasn’t. Leaving Avon with the uncomfortable knowledge that it had been entirely about Blake. That he had wanted his affairs to be Blake’s business.)

Blake wasn’t going to remember this, but he was. And Avon knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from railing against it, trying to prove Blake wrong, trying frantically to tell himself it wasn’t true. Or that if it was true, it didn’t matter.

Because he didn’t know how to fix it, if it was true. If it mattered. Avon saw no way of attempting to remedy the situation other than by becoming a shallow, unsubstantive imitation of Blake, with no conviction behind the façade. And even that wouldn’t satisfy Blake, who had thought Avon different and equal, who had imagined he saw those qualities already fully-developed in him. What did he want Blake to do? Wait while Avon made something of himself from scratch?

Anna had never asked this of him—it had always been enough for Anna that he’d been witty and relatively handsome. Suddenly it seemed pathetic that the love of his life hadn’t wanted any more of him than that. Cruel of Blake to reach back and taint her, and crueler still that it wasn’t done out of jealousy, wasn’t even done intentionally. Awful that Blake should, at the last, understand him perfectly, and yet not even like him. Not even want his friendship, let alone anything further.

But if Blake was perfectly correct in his assessment—what _was_ important to him, if not _any_ of this? If Avon were just a good technician, a decent survivor—any machine performed. Any rat survived. What, then, was the substance and the point of him? He supposed he loved Blake, for what little that was apparently worth. And Blake loved him—and held him, now, in utter contempt. As though Avon were something like Travis. How long was it going to take Blake to connect up _that_ unkind simile? He wouldn’t want to think it, but Blake had never ignored an ugly truth in his life.

Avon lived on a ship with Blake, and every day since the situation had come to a head he had watched _Blake_ get better, watched him fall out of love in slow motion. While his own condition showed no signs of improvement.

And he knew (no matter that Blake wouldn’t consciously remember this evening) that that little flicker of distaste for him in Blake’s eyes would never quite dissipate. That he himself had put it there with his choices. Blake was good at resisting conditioning. What Blake’s consciousness let slip, his body would remember for him.

How could he have been such a fool?

And how long before Blake overcame his sentiments effectively enough to start treating Avon in a properly reserved way that befitted his considered opinion of Avon? To start treating Avon as Avon had always accused Blake of treating him—like something instrumental. Why shouldn’t he? What more was Avon owed than civility? Blake had said it himself. Avon was entitled to nothing more or less than being placated or reasoned with, in accordance with his own well-advertised self-interest.

Avon wanted to be gone before it came to that. To leave before the house finished burning down around him. He wouldn’t get out cleanly, but he would survive. It was what he was good at—all he was good at, it seemed. All he was.


End file.
